Android User Lawsuit Highlights Personal Data Perils

Your personal data, anonymized or not, makes the bread and butter of today’s web giants who offer to place individualized and precisely targeted adverts in front of billions of smartphone and Internet users.

Once you’ve ticked your data away to access a service (agreeing to never-read terms of service), your data is passed on from one app to another, from one service to another (depending on whatever business agreement in place), then collated and analyzed to make sense of your overall behavior and preferences.

In some cases when the data does not necessarily make sense, it may just be collected for no other purpose than to future-proof a company’s offering with applications yet to come. There seem to never be enough data, whether for commercial or for spying purposes.

Big data analytics is so much engrained in Internet companies’ strategies that some would argue the Web would not work or would offer a less rich user experience if all this data was not given away by the users. In fact, it is always the argument put forward, “give us your data, we’ll offer you a better service.”
So will you get a better service in exchange of all this data?

It is interesting to note that in a class-action consolidated last year in San Francisco, Android users sued Google, claiming that the company had gained and allowed third parties to have unauthorized access to their mobile devices running on the Android operating system to collect personal data. Reportedly, the users said they were unaware of and did not knowingly consent to collection of the data, including home and workplace locations and current whereabouts.

Location tracking is an "opt-in" feature that users have to activate, Google defended but then the plaintiffs claimed that the company’s continuous records of location data exposed them to data overage charges and decreased battery life (somehow a poorer user experience). The final judgment has yet to come, but it is an interesting take on personal data.

The ongoing NSA scandal is somehow raising consumers’ awareness about privacy issues and what can be done with all the data they distribute freely with every web-connected and geo-located device.

Reclaiming control of personal data is not an easy task, but not sharing it so blindly is one step in the right direction.

In most cases, the data you generate could just run on the device you own and remain there for operation. Alternatively, one should be able to opt for an encrypted data vault where all personal data could be managed from a user’s perspective, creating virtual and administrative identities from a single access, then allowing different profiles to be seen by different web applications, as meta-data only (like some sort of RSS feed under their control). Personal data would not be so fragmented and would become more portable.

Quite agree when you use Android, your personal data is at stake especially if you try to install any of their apps. The most common chat apps like WhatsApp compromises so much on user's privacy. But then many users are not that tech savvy that they understand whats going on in the background. Even in the facebook if you install on Android, there is lot of privacy infringement that user may not come to know about.

If you're going to use these devices (smart phones and apps), you pretty much have to resign yourself to giving up sovereignty over your personal data. It's rarely clear, even to experienced users, who's getting access to what and what will be done with it.

I have on occasion decided against using an app I wanted because the data access seemed too onerous, but that's the exception.

I am not sure people give PRIVACY a lot of credit in real life to the way we put efforts writing and commenting about it online. More and more people are trying to share their lives on Twitter and Facebook, yet, we are talking of privacy.

The default is to go back to feature phone if one has any concern about privacy. I am not sure of any product that can offer privacy in the digital age unless they are not selling ads. Personally, I do not see the risks and do not put a lot of thoughts on this privacy thing. I do not see the personal harm that you are harvesting my data and using annonymously.

As long as my financial security is not compromised ( my bank acount information or my credit card passords ) and my relations are not compromised , I would not give a damn if they capture all other kind of personal data about me .